Sonali Bank is lacking adequate security measures set by the Bangladesh Bank safety directives.
The Bangladesh Bank (BB) finds lax security in vault rooms of Sonali Bank. The branches of the bank are also housed in inappropriate buildings (in most cases they are old, run-down and with faulty structure).
Very often the vaults cross their limit and insurance on those vaults are not taken out properly.
The BB carried out inspection at eight chest branches – Kishorganj, Narsingdi, Mymensingh, Netrokona, Tangail, Gazipur, Jamalpur and Sherpur – after the bank burglary in Kishoreganj Sadar branch on January 26.
The branch where government transaction takes place is called chest branch.
Burglars looted Tk16.4 crore from a branch of Sonali Bank Limited in Kishoreganj Sadar by digging a tunnel. Just after one month Tk32.51 lakh was stolen from another branch of Sonali Bank in Adamdighi upazila of Bogra on Saturday.
The central bank may ask the Sonali Bank to inform it about what safety measures it had taken after the Kishoreganj branch burglary, said a senior executive of the BB.
The BB formed an investigation committee headed by its Executive Director Subhankar Saha after the Kishoreganj branch burglary.
The team found some common security problems in those branches. Of them, most of the branches have no vault and insurance security. Moreover, money deposited in those branches exceeded the vault limit.
The investigation was carried out from January 29 to February 5 this year.
The central bank has served notices several times to those branches of Sonali Bank to take safety measures but they did not pay heed and as a result recurrence of burglary happened, Subhhankar Saha said.
The central bank also carried out regular security inspection of the Kishorganj branch of Sonali Bank and just before the burglary it warned the bank about its lack of vault security and asked it to take safety measures. But the bank did not follow the instruction.
The bank should be located at a safe distance from the structures of individuals and organisations which Subnankar terms alarming.
“We hold bank officials responsible for such incident,” he said.
He said, almost all branches of the bank store money much more than its capacity and as a result they are to keep money outside the vault. We asked the bank several times to increase the vault limit. But they did not do so.
The central bank last week decided to carry out inspection in eight more chest branches of Sonali Bank across the country. The branches are Rajbari, Faridpur, Habiganj, Comilla, Brahmanbaria, Feni, Lakshmipur and Noakhali.
We asked the bank to tighten its security by increasing manpower, said Bangladesh Bank General Manager Saiful Islam.
Sonali Bank Director Zaid Bakht, however, said: “It is a long process to change the branch location.”
After the Kishoreganj branch burglary as a safety measure we formed a risk management committee, he said.
Sonali Bank is suffering from image crisis due to repeated burglary. We will soon recover from the crisis by taking security measures, he said.
Under the structural security measures, banks are to set up security-tested doors with steel wall around the vault space of the banks. The floors and roofs around the vaults also have to be certified by an engineer, according to the Bangladesh Bank instruction.
As part of technical security measure, there must be a security alarm round the clock with a closed-circuit television camera at the vaults. There should be an uninterrupted connectivity between the bank’s central information system and the vault’s security system.
Automated fire extinguishers are also a must for the security of the vault.
As far as insurance coverage is concerned the insurance on the money deposited at the vaults has to be covered completely. “We have formed 61 teams to examine the security measures in the 61 principle branches of the bank situated across the country,” said Sonali Bank Managing Director Pradip Kumar Dutta.